Site Mobile Navigation

Dramatic Duo Take Reins Again at Westport

JOANNE WOODWARD and Anne Keefe look like two former sorority sisters who have kept in touch. Both have white hair now, Ms. Woodward’s short and chic with bangs, Ms. Keefe’s elegant and pulled back. Both dress like affluent country ladies, in pants outfits with good-looking jewelry. Both complain that they’ve gained weight. Talking to each other, they laugh easily.

But the reason they are sitting in a conference room on the mezzanine level of the Westport Country Playhouse is dead serious. The artistic director they brought in a little more than two years ago, Tazewell Thompson, is gone. The theater’s board announced on Jan. 2 that Mr. Thompson was leaving because of “artistic and professional differences.”

Ms. Woodward and Ms. Keefe have returned to their former jobs, this time as interim artistic directors. Fans of the theater, taken aback by the announcement, are asking what went wrong.

Ms. Woodward declined to comment. “At the time this has all been happening, I haven’t been at the theater particularly,” she said. “I’ve been involved in other things.”

Both women had moved on, believing that their five years with the playhouse — taking it through a $17.8 million renovation and transforming a summer theater into a year-round operation for the first time in its history — was the end of their day-to-day involvement.

Ms. Woodward, 77, and Ms. Keefe, 61, first met decades ago when Ms. Woodward was appearing at Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, where Ms. Keefe was the longtime stage manager. Although Ms. Woodward had never appeared onstage at Westport until 2000, around the time the two women became its artistic directors, Ms. Keefe worked there as resident stage manager in the late 1970s and returned in the ’90s.

It was in 1999 that Bill Haber, a Westport board member, invited Ms. Woodward to lunch, told her the playhouse was in danger of being torn down and urged her to help.

Shortly thereafter Ms. Keefe was in the middle of a dinner party at her home when the call came. “Around 9 o’clock at night we were all sitting in the living room and the phone rang,” Ms. Keefe said, recalling that she enjoyed making her excuses to her guests by name-dropping. “I said, oh, excuse me, it’s Joanne Woodward!”

Basically Ms. Woodward told her she had been talked into taking on this project “and I told them I wouldn’t do it if you weren’t there.”

Close to a decade later, they’re at again. And now they have a show — Morris Panych’s comedy “Vigil,” about a man at the deathbed of an aunt who keeps hanging on, opening in late February — to finish casting and get into rehearsals by the end of this month. The two plays that Mr. Thompson was going to direct, “A Strange and Separate People” and “Sweet Bird of Youth” (starring Phylicia Rashad), will be canceled, basically as a courtesy to him. The rest of the schedule is being rethought, Ms. Woodward and Ms. Keefe said.

“It’s going to be pretty much the same,” Ms. Woodward contended. “There’s one other play definitely that we have to replace. And we’re exploring maybe some others.”

Ms. Keefe smiled and said, “The next show goes into rehearsal in March and we don’t know what it is yet.”

Photo

STEPPING IN Left, Anne Keefe, and Joanne Woodward.Credit
Thomas McDonald for The New York Times

The other productions originally scheduled for 2008 were Craig Wright’s romantic drama “The Pavilion”; “Hot ’n Cole,” a Cole Porter musical revue; David Wiltse’s office-politics comedy “Scramble!”; and John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” directed by Ms. Keefe. The only certainty is that Mr. Thompson, who declined to comment for this article, will not be around.

Since early 2006 he had become a highly visible figure at the playhouse, greeting theatergoers and strolling to the front of the orchestra section before virtually every performance to make a cheerful welcoming speech. But the critical reaction to his first season, including reviews by this writer, was mixed.

Mr. Thompson’s second season included “Being Alive,” a compilation of Stephen Sondheim music that Sylviane Gold, who also writes theater reviews for the Connecticut section of The New York Times, described as a “brave effort” and “All About Us,” a musical version of “The Skin of Our Teeth,” which she said had its only transcending moments in Eartha Kitt’s performance.“Sedition,” by the theater’s playwright-in-residence, Mr. Wiltse, was received more warmly, as was “Mary’s Wedding,” a wartime romance.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Mr. Thompson’s tenure at Westport began on a hopeful note. After a freelance career directing theater and opera, he gave up his Manhattan apartment, moved to Connecticut and told The Times in August 2005: “Being responsible to a board excites me. It doesn’t limit me or make me feel challenged. I like the idea of having budgetary restrictions and having someone to answer to.”

In the same article, Ms. Woodward sang the new artistic director’s praises: “Tazewell has wit and humor. And a real sense of the need for education, outreach and being part of the community.” Mr. Thompson described Ms. Woodward as “my guardian angel.”

Two years later, all that optimism and warmth did not appear to have translated into full houses.

“When you change the calendar, it’s hard to tell how you’re doing,” Ms. Keefe said cautiously. “We used to sell five shows in the space of three months. Now we’re selling eight shows in the space of 12 months, and the long holiday show. So it’s sort of apples and oranges.”

Subscriptions have not decreased, she said, but of course “everybody in the business will tell you we wish our box office were stronger.”

But then all this change at the playhouse is very new. It has been less than three years since the glamorous new theater replaced the old red barn with bench seating that had been the Westport Country Playhouse since 1931, when it opened with “The Streets of New York,” starring Dorothy Gish.

It wasn’t until June 2005 that a civilized heating system allowed the theater to expand beyond its traditional summer season.

“It is really our first attempt, Tazewell’s first attempt,” Ms. Woodward said, “of really seeing what it would be like to do a season year round.”

Ms. Keefe agreed. “It was an enormous leap,” she said. “And maybe we bit off more than we can chew. So we’ve revised the calendar again, and we’re going to look at it again, starting some heavier programming in the winter.”

Asked what she would like to see at the playhouse in the future, Ms. Woodward talked about a children’s theater. “I think we could do it and do it so well,” she said, then laughed. “And all the parents would come.” (Her two grandsons — “almost 12 and almost 9” — are taking acting classes.)

She also fantasizes about doing big-cast shows that are often too costly for regional theaters, like “Liliom,” the play on which the musical “Carousel” is based.

Neither woman expressed a strong preference for either original works or revivals, but Ms. Keefe said: “I would like to get us into a place where we got good new scripts as a matter of course. I would like to think that every once in a while a John Patrick Shanley would send us a script we could embrace and get on with.”

The board, they said, has not even begun the search for a new artistic director. People associated with the theater have said that they want someone who can attract major actors, directors and playwrights, and it would be difficult to top the drawing power of Ms. Woodward, an Oscar-winning movie star married to an Oscar-winning movie star. (She and Paul Newman will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary later this month.)

Both Ms. Woodward and Ms. Keefe stressed that they were back on the job only temporarily.

“We would like to walk away, eventually, knowing that the playhouse was in the hands of someone with enormous vision,” Ms. Keefe said. “It’s pie-in-the-sky dreaming, but I don’t want to walk away until it’s happy, it’s fulfilling itself.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page CT1 of the New York edition with the headline: Dramatic Duo Take Reins Again at Westport. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe